Christian Hertweck

Christian Hertweck is a German chemist, deputy director and head of the department of biomolecular chemistry at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Products Research and Infection Biology.

Hertweck studied chemistry at the University of Bonn and did his doctorate under Wilhelm Boland at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in 1996–1999.

[1] Since 2006, he has been full professor at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (chair of natural product chemistry) and head of the department of biomolecular chemistry at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology; in 2008 he became deputy director of the institute.

[1] Hertweck's research focuses on specialized metabolites of bacteria and fungi with the intent to identify pharmacologically relevant substances and to understand how they are assembled.

Genetic methods (genome mining) and are primarily used to discover new active substances.